From Dr. Roger Pielke Senior: (with apologies to Tattoo)
There is a news article on March 29 2011 from Rueters titled
The text begins with [highlight added]
“Aircraft condensation trails criss-crossing the sky may be warming the planet on a normal day more than the carbon dioxide emitted by all planes since the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903, a study said on Tuesday.”
Another excerpt reads
“The study, by experts at the DLR German Aerospace Center, estimated that the net warming effect for the Earth of contrails and related cirrus clouds at any one time was 31 milliwatts per square meter, more than the warming effect of accumulated CO2 from aviation of 28 milliwatts.”
If correct, this is a remarkable finding with respect to contrails as a climate forcing. It also shows that as we study the climate system, we find it is affected by a wider diversity of human climate forcings than concluded by the IPCC. The human effect on the climate system is not dominated by CO2 and a few other greenhouse gases.
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Just a firm reminder, any comment mentioning, referring to, or paraphrasing anything to do with “chemtrails” will be automatically sent to the bit bucket. – Anthony
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I should think at night and in winter – where we’re seeing the greatest increase in temperatures – would be the critical times to investigate in detail.
This will end the era of air travel.
As in the UK the roll out of the 11.5 billion pound smart grid is underway all we need is a personal carbon budget and our traveling days are over.
Any opposition to the green totalitarians will be punished immediately by a power cut off. That will teach the skeptic bastards.
http://notrickszone.com/2011/03/30/contrails-and-con-science-in-the-service-of-masterplans/
This effect from contrails is quite interesting and something I’ve often wondered about as I’ve watched the many contrails over my home state of Colorado. It certainly does seem to be a strong rebuttal to those who say humans can’t affect something as “large as the earth”, when in fact, the atmosphere is just a relatively thin layer and something as seemingly insignificant as contrail, when multiplied by the tens of thousands generated everyday, and then expanded in the way described in the study, you’d expect an impact. I am surprised it was this large however…
I thought that the clouds in general provided a cooling effect, and that the effect of clouds higher in the atmosphere (such as cirrus clouds) was greater due to reflecting the sunlight. Also, wasn’t there some evaluation of temperatures just after 9/11, where for three days there were NO aircraft in the sky (though I don’t remember what the finding of this were . . . ) , and how it compared to days before, or after ?
Doesn’t this fly in the face of what NOAA (I believe) was saying about the 3 days of no flights over the US right after 9/11/01, specifically that temps spiked during that period?
Sounds like a world wide no fly zone could be proposed. I’d begin with private jets.
Wait just a minute….I thought all those contrails were COOLING the planet by increasing reflectivity? My understanding is that the water is mostly already there but the planes exhaust just causes it to precipitate?
More “science” to confuse people….confused people are more easily deceived.
I had heard previously that the effect was exactly the opposite. Didn’t someone use the post-9/11 shutdown of air traffic to evaluate the climate forcing of contrails? I seem to recall seeing this on a Nova episode (“Dimming the Sun”, Apr 18, 2006; http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html ). Perhaps this is all “TV science”, but it’s interesting to have the Hansen set essentially contradicting the finding of this study. I have often wondered after seeing this if the Clean Air Act was not itself a climate forcing that impacted some of the trends of US temperatures in the second half of the 20th century.
The timing of this is suspect…just when Britain proposes a “masterplan” regarding transportation and rationing holiday flights. Hmmm
But you’re right – if true it reveals lots of gaps in IPCC knowledge.
Ch**tr***s —-Why? Some Americanism I haven’t hitherto come acoss?
“This is a breakthrough in modeling and understanding of contrails,” Olivier Boucher, of the Met Office Hadley Center in England who wrote a related article in Nature, told Reuters.
Those models again!
So the temperature rise (unadjusted upwards) of the past 100 years due to CO2 emissions is even less than 0.3degC!
Well then let me be the first to propose hydrogen-free jet fuel. Just imagine the cooling that could be achieved if we were to stop dumping water vapor into the stratosphere!
…yet another danger posed by our insatiable need to dump DHMO residue wherever we see fit, I’m afraid.
Wouldn’t the contrails also have an effect on albedo and cool the earth a bit?
If clouds are a negative feedback, then wouldn’t con trails be as well? Mind you, I wouldn’t have guessed that global warming causes snow and cold weather either. Does anything cause cooling any more?
Cheers!
Dear Anthony,
The little red warning clause at the end certainly cooled my jets. Think of the humor foregone!!!
How about Contrailians? Can we mention those folks? UFO’s? Tinfoil hats?
I presume this is based on the theory that high-altitude clouds have a warming effect and low-altitude clouds have a cooling one (?)
Anthony, if you’re not going to read the Tips & Notes thread then just get rid of it so people don’t waste time posting. This story was noted there at least six times before the Pielke post.
REPLY: Apologies, given what transpired today, and what I had to do yesterday to defend my work, I’ve been a little busy. – Anthony
Wouldn’t the albedo increase caused by the predominately daytime contrails have to block more incoming solar radiation than outgoing re-radiation. I don’t get it.
I see subsidized solar airplanes in our future.
This might very well be true for it’s probable, however everyone seem to (dis)miss proportions.
If CO2 affect climate like a woman fart in the universe does, and them planes affect the climate like a couple of Al Bundy farts in the universe. It’s still just three farts in the universe and will take a few billion years until they really starts to smell the place up.
So how big is its effect?
Oh, sorry, essentially they just need tons of more of the tax payers money to figure that one out.
Now I will have to go and read this thoroughly – as it sounds like a contradiction of the cloud providing cooling (-ve feedback) theory if contrails are going to contribute warming? Or is it just related to the height of contrails compared to real clouds?
My first gut reaction is that on the scale of that photograph, actual jet contrails would be far far thinner in width than they appear on the photo. I wonder if there is a way for the public to have access the original photo just to verify its authenticity?
Wait a minute – I remember a documentary a few years ago going on about “global cooling” which blamed contrails on cooling the planet, rather than warming.
There was a study done on the effect of 9/11 (all planes were grounded for 3 days) and the surface temperature, which apparently “proved” the effect.
This hasn’t been turned into warmcool has it?
Hm.
I seem to recall but I’m not sure that this effect was first seen just after 9/11 where the absence of contrails led to more intense temperature differences between day and night ?? (It might be I’m remembering wrong, dredging up an old memory! I’ll be happy to be corrected!)
Didn’t the temperature go up a little bit after 9/11 when there weren’t any contrails when all the planes over the US were grounded?